Originally Posted by Niall FergusonIncredible as it may seem, I believe we are capable of repeating that catastrophic error. I fear that, one day, we shall wake with a start to discover that the Islamists have repeated the Bolshevik achievement, which was to acquire the resources and capability to threaten our very existence.

Looks likely we are about to be condemned to relive some of those nightmares again sadly. The 'intellectuals' are a walk-up oxymoron by their inaction in this area twice over and it should this time be a wake up call to the rest of us to invert every hypothesis they come up with every time.__________________Yours Sincerely Queenslander

When does embracing race as a point of distinction become retrograde to our common humanity? Surely when it resembles a new form of apartheid, an ideological one that dictates what people of a certain colour should think and what they should write about.

Black racism is creeping on to university campuses in the US and into the broader American culture. And if it’s happening there, it can happen here.

Being squeamish about black racism will see us repeating the racism of our not very distant past. Hiding behind the walls of political correctness will prevent us from moving beyond a stultifying culture fixated on race and skin colour as a determinant of human destiny to one that understands that there is a common humanity.

Examples of a regressive obsession with race are mounting. Last month in the US, a panel discussion at Rutgers University about identity politics as a new form of racialism was subjected to the now familiar disruption: chanting, screaming and ranting from students who came not to listen but to shout down those who today hold views that are treated as confronting, offensive or, crazier still, a form of violence.

Members of the audience shouted down one speaker in particular at the event, which was part of the Unsafe Spaces college tour sponsored by left-libertarian British website Spiked. Kmele Foster, host of libertarian podcast The Fifth Column, warned against the growing “Balkanisation” of people of different races. Foster is black and he was duly accused of “deracialising” himself.

Foster pointed out that proponents of race-based identity politics have a few things in common with white supremacists. He said few in the audience would wish to hear from Richard Spencer — a white nationalist who speaks of race as a source of pride and division — because we recognise that it is backward to talk about race in that way. Yet black activists make the same claims about their race and fail to recognise how similarly retrograde their ideas are. “What’s retrograde is not the embrace of whiteness,” Foster said. “It is the embrace of race.”

The same hypocrisy strikes at the heart of “intersectionality”, the identity politics buzzword that conjoins race and sex to claim a double dose of victimhood. Writing about the Rutgers event for freethinkers online magazine Quillette, J. Oliver Conroy says “intersectionality is a strange kind of essentialism that professes to hate essentialism. It assumes people are determined by inherited characteristics, which is exactly what racists also think.”

Black racism need not be an identikit match for white racism to be equally retrograde. Racism, whatever the colour, tears at the fabric of liberalism, a set of profound beliefs based on our common humanity; of natural rights of life, liberty and property that accrue to us at birth as human beings.

It’s bad enough labelling a white person as a white supremacist for disagreeing with the agenda of black activists — as hap­pened to Bret Weinstein, a politically progressive professor of biology at Evergreen State College in Washington state in the US. Weinstein disagreed with a blacks-only day on campus earlier this year, arguing it was divisive. What followed became a case study of the left devouring its own: they shut him down and forced a long-time fighter against racial discrimination to resign.

It’s worse when black activists try to shut down a person of colour, such as Foster, for refusing to be form-fitted into the rigid grid of identity politics. Race-based identity politics, premised on the belief that political views are dictated by skin colour, delivers a trifecta of poor outcomes for black people. It’s a travesty that those who historically had power stripped from them for being black are stripping free will and the power to think for oneself from other blacks. And screaming down debate shuts out the search for facts, making meaningful change on genuine issues of racial discrimination or law and order less likely.

Earlier this month feminist Christina Hoff Sommers spoke at Williams College in Massachusetts as part of an Uncomfortable Learning program, this time led by a handful of students to promote open debate. Like the Unsafe ­Spaces tour, Uncomfortable Learning invites speakers on campus who are regarded as controversial, not for being beyond the mainstream of ideas but for holding views that challenge an orthodoxy that is strangling campus free speech and intellectual curiosity. These campus discussions ought to be unremarkable but make headlines because they are met with resistance to the idea of a common humanity where people, regardless of colour and circumstance, can come to better understand one another by listening, talking and exercising empathy.

At Williams College, members of the audience turned up not to engage but to scream at Sommers and shut down the discussion. Zach­ary Wood, a black student who was one of the organisers of the discussion, wrote that he was informed that “many members of the Black Student Union want nothing to do with him or other black students associated with Uncomfortable Learning”.

A few months back, The Economist reported on more resistance to the idea of a shared humanity, when screaming student protesters disrupted the classes of assistant professor Lucia Martinez Valdivia, who describes herself as mixed race and queer, a teacher within the humanities department of Reed College in Portland, Oregon. Valdivia asked students not to protest and explained that she suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder. First, students dressed in black sat quietly, then they harangued her for being a “race traitor” who favoured white suprem­acist beliefs because she didn’t oppose a humanities syllabus they regarded as Eurocentric. For wearing a T-shirt that said “Poetry is Lit”, they called her “anti-black” for appropriating black slang. She was labelled “ableist”, too, for taking a different view on trigger warnings. And she was called a “gaslighter” (a voguish term for emotional abuse) for making disadvantaged students doubt their own oppression.

Writing on her blog, Valdivia said: “I am scared to teach courses on race, gender or sexuality or even texts that bring these issues up in any way … I’m at a loss as to how to begin to address it, especially since many of these students don’t believe in historicity or objective facts (they denounce the latter as being a tool of the white cisheteropatriarchy).” Like Evergreen College, Reed is one of the most “progressive” colleges in the US, which today means being the least open to freedom of expression and intellectual inquiry.

Nicholas Christakis, a sociology professor at Yale University who was drawn into a campus fracas over Halloween costumes and free expression a few years ago, says that the hysteria distorts discussion of serious philosophical ideas about cultural appropriation and other issues. It’s what Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist and author of The Righteous Mind, calls “concept creep”. As Christakis said in a podcast interview, the “history of ideas and of culture and of art and music is endless theft. It’s endless modification and transformation and exchange of ideas of thoughts and of musical and artistic forms and so forth. To start claiming that (Valdivia) couldn’t teach these things and she couldn’t wear ‘Poetry is Lit’ because she’s appropriating African-American slang is a crazy caricature of what is potentially an interesting philosophical idea to discuss.”

The flip side of claims about cultural appropriation, where only coloured authors can create characters of colour, is that certain authors must necessarily create caricatures of their own culture.

Earlier this month, Korean author Leonard Chan revealed that esteemed editors, publishers and agents rejected his seventh book, The Lockpicker, for not being Korean enough. One wrote to him: “The characters, especially the main character, just do not seem Asian enough. They act like everyone else. They don’t eat Korean food, they don’t speak Korean … For example, in the scene when she looks into the mirror, you don’t show how she sees her slanted eyes, or how she thinks of her Asianness.”

A few weeks ago a cover of Vogue magazine came in for race-based interrogation too. Featuring mixed-race model Adwoa Aboah, complaints were made that she was wearing heavy make-up, making her paler than usual. Not black enough? Not white enough? It’s two sides of the same retrograde fixation with race.

As Kenan Malik posited in The New York Times earlier this year, after three editors in Canada lost their jobs for defending cultural appropriation, imagine if Elvis Presley had been prevented from appropriating so-called black music in the 1950s? It would have done nothing to further civil rights. In an era when radio stations refused to play Chuck Berry songs, calling it “race music”, Elvis broke down barriers.

The civil rights movement confronted racism in the 50s and 60s by demanding equality regardless of skin colour. More than a half-century later the new racism, boosted by bogus calls to diversity, walls off people according to colour, culture and class, dismembering our common humanity into ever smaller pieces. The notion that personal identity, colour, race, sex or sexuality (or some bingo game of intersectionality) defines everything about a person means never rising to a higher level of understanding of the human condition. It beggars belief that this needs saying, yet today, in growing circles, it does need saying: suffering comes in many forms, our lived experiences can vary greatly in form and gradation, yet still we may share emotions of grief, alienation, fear, anger, anxiety and so on. We should beware a new racism that divides us, and in so doing destroys empathy, a core human trait that allows us to better understand one another.

Sadly I am getting more and more convinced, by their own actions, by the month that quite a few governments could save quite a few dollars and nonsense by closing for good quite a few Universities for quite a while.__________________Yours Sincerely Queenslander

I gets even tastier now that Theresa May condemns Donald Trump for his retweet. Now I don't support or condone Britain First, but why the outrage over the Far Right alone and never about the Communist, Islamist and IRA apologists in public life?

MELBOURNE didn’t look like the world’s most liveable city on Monday night.

The footage of police in riot gear trying to control a baying crowd throwing rocks, bottles and even street signs looked like it was from another country, one riddled with racial and religious unrest.

That is what happens when you let totalitarian thugs dictate who can and cannot speak in a free society.

It says much about the appalling climate of censorship in Australia that a speech by UK firebrand Milo Yiannopoulos can inspire the mayhem that we saw in Kensington.

Calling yourself “anti-fascists” doesn’t fool anybody when you behave like fascists by using violence to silence dissenting voices. Some of the feral mob even blamed police for the violence outside the Australian Pavilion.

Here’s a novel idea that might have not occurred to Yiannopoulos’s critics: ignore him.

Last time I checked, no one was forced to buy a ticket to hear him speak and he is not inciting violence.

If you find Yiannopoulos offensive or intellectually vacuous, feel free to ignore his Australian tour.

That is what normal, sane folk do when someone they don’t like visits the country. What you don’t do is riot for five hours and elevate a minor event to front page news.

Alternatively, you could mount an argument against the Brit’s worldview.

If you don’t have much going on in life you may opt to show your displeasure by peacefully protesting; but you have no right to use violence to intimidate individuals and businesses in order to shut down an event you don’t like.

What is it about elements of the Far Left that cannot abide diversity of thought?

Why do these people think they can trample on the rights of others who want to hear a speech or attend a book launch or speak to a member of parliament?

Let’s not pretend that violent protesters trying to silence ideological opponents is a problem with both sides of politics. Far Left commentators are free to speak without the threat of riots. When visiting Australia they are typically invited on programs on the public broadcaster and can appear at university campuses without fear.

The venues where they appear are not monstered by a targeted campaign of harassment nor are their audience subjected to vile slurs and acts of violence. That’s how it should be.

But elements of the Left appear incapable of such civility. In recent months we have seen Ayaan Hirsi Ali targeted by a disgraceful smear campaign from Leftists feminists.

In the end the women’s right campaigner and FGM victim cancelled her Australian tour. Conservative columnist Andrew Bolt was forced to cancel his book launch due to threats from Far Left groups; that was a month after he was assaulted in Carlton by Leftist activists while attending a book launch by Professor Steve Kates.

Even a meeting between members of the Jewish community and One Nation MPs had to be cancelled late last year because of security concerns posed by, funnily enough, so-called “anti-fascist” groups.

As for Yiannopoulos, he is a best-selling author who is brash, crass and controversial — but anyone who is familiar with his writing, rather than the one dimensional characterisation provided by much of the media — would know he can also be perspicacious and witty.

He is from the Donald Trump school of conservatism which at times bears no resemblance to traditional conservatism.

What Trump and Yiannopoulos do is fight using the Left’s rule book. They engage in hyperbole, can be hypocritical and do not shy away from personal abuse of opponents. They would rather win dirty than lose with dignity.

It’s no surprise that the group that unearthed the damaging video of Yiannopoulos seeming to condone underage sex is the same one that has campaigned tirelessly against Trump, the Reagan Battalion.

What he said in the video is his greatest “crime” although he has apologised sincerely.

I and many other conservatives slammed Yiannopoulos for the comments, which suggested that “coming of age relationships” between older men and young boys can be positive.

He was talking about his own experience of having a sexual relationship with a 29-year-old priest when he was 17.

Yiannopoulos has been labelled everything from “anti-queer” to “racist” by clownish commentators. That would seem strange given he is gay and married to a black man. Meanwhile they ignore his commentary on the plight of homosexuals in the Muslim world and the fear of such attitudes gaining a foothold in the West.

Extensive polling by ICM showed that 52 per cent of British Muslims think homosexuality should be illegal, compared with 5 per cent among the wider population. Never mind being supportive of same sex marriage, half of this growing community in Britain think that being gay should be a crime — only 18 per cent of Muslims polled thought that homosexuality should be legal in Britain.

But no one cares to talk about such issues when they can instead be outraged by Yiannopoulos not liking aboriginal art or calling Waleed Aly a “coward”.

If you’re familiar with Yiannopoulos’ work and can differentiate between jokes and serious commentary then you’d find the outrage about his tour bemusing.

The organisers were even forced to keep venue details secret — to reduce the chances of businesses being badgered — until a few hours before each event.

It’s absurd to allow a small number of troublemakers to infringe on the rights of others. Any protesters, far left or right, who engage in acts of violence must face the full consequences of their lawlessness.

In a cracker episode of South Park, the good-natured but dim townsfolk line up to have their “What Would Jesus Do” plastic wristbands publicly snipped off.

When they discover that Jesus, like Lance Armstrong, was on performance-enhancing drugs when he carried out his miracles, they move on to the next cause, and the next, eventually wearing a bit of plastic for the farmers of Belarus. Their sweet stupidity is best captured by a quiet little chap whose kaleidoscope of plastic coloured bands reaches up his forearms.

My favourite character in A Scause for Applause is the Dr Seuss-style capitalist, a travelling salesman who turns a profit from other people’s vanity, making wristbands for peanuts, selling them at a handsome mark-up, and singing this little ditty:

“In the modern age, there are those that believe that a cause is a thing to be worn on one’s sleeve. And so, we sell a cause, it’s called a Scause, and wearing a Scause gets you lots of applause. We start with some plastic which is sherpped by our Sherpas, then dip it in colours that show off your purpose. There are green Scauses for recycling, blue Scauses for kitties and pink Scauses that focus on nothing but titties,” he chirps, walking bubbling plastic in vats labelled “Animal Rights” and “Breast Cancer”.

“We make Scauses for this, we make Scauses for that, why there’s even a Scause for just being fat.”

When the doubly duped townsfolk wake up to a man making a motza from selling silly wristbands, Jesus offers them a new righteous way to display their virtue. “On T-shirts,” proclaims Jesus, ripping open his robe to reveal his T-shirt, plastered with “Free Pussy Riot”. The crowd cheers.

Well before we had a perfect phrase to mock the moral vanity of those who think that sounding good equals doing good, Trey Parker and Matt Stone used South Park. And then along came the term that captured this modern and regressive zeitgeist. Virtue-signalling is like one of those neat German words with lots of syllables that captures an entire phenomenon. Like treppenwitz, a word to describe that annoying moment when you come up with the killer line only after a conversation ends. Treppen means stairs, you’re on the stairs on your way out, and it’s too late.

Speaking of clever ripostes and stairs, British author and journalist James Bartholomew described to me over lunch in London last week how he came up with the phrase virtue-signalling. He was heading up an escalator from the basement level of Whole Foods, a swanky store across the road from our chic restaurant in Kensington.

On that day back in 2015, the windows of Whole Foods featured posters declaring that “Values Matter”. And it’s true, values do matter. But what values have to do with overpriced bananas was not immediately, and is still not, obvious to Bartholomew.

Whole Foods is a mecca where the well-heeled and those seeking to signal their virtue buy luxury-priced foods that taste good and make them feel good too. Not by satisfying a craving or hunger. That’s so last century. Today’s customers feel good by buying an avocado or organic toilet paper at marked up prices because “values matter”. Unwittingly, all they are doing is boosting the bottom-line of Whole Foods shareholders. And like South Park’s Dr Seussian capitalist, Whole Foods has done well from turning berry-buying into virtue-signalling for the unthinking rich. Last August Amazon bought the upmarket store for $US13.7 billion.

Bartholomew regards virtue as something carried out quietly, selflessly, for no applause, whether from others or internally. He mentions a woman he knew, “who nursed her disabled husband for a decade before he died. She never boasted about it.

“She was truly virtuous.”

“It is irritating,” he adds, “that the virtue-signalling person thinks him or herself morally superior to the one who makes real sacrifices to do the right thing.”

While the derivation of virtue-signalling is contested — the phrase popped up in a few obscure places before Bartholomew’s escalator epiphany — the London writer turned it into common parlance when he mentioned it in a column in Britain’s The Spectator magazine in 2015. A search of Google trends shows it spread quickly, first in the British media, then across the Atlantic, with a big up-tick when Donald Trump jumped on to the political stage. For members of polite society, a sure way to signal your virtue is by announcing how much you hate Trump. The more you hate Trump, the more virtuous you become, at least among fellow travellers.

On the spectrum of virtue-­signalling, plenty of it is harmless. Like being angry at Trump and wearing a pink pussy hat. Or turning off your lights one night a year, but leaving them on every other night. Martin Parkinson signing a big piece of cardboard last year pledging, with cameras clicking, to “stand up, speak out and act to prevent men’s violence against women” was harmless no-strings-attached virtue-signalling by the head of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet. Same when misguided TV personalities joined a hashtag hijab campaign snapping solidarity pictures of themselves in a hijab, and when a similar bunch of naifs signed on to #Illridewithyou, while terrified hostages were still being held at gunpoint in the Lindt cafe by an Islamist terrorist in December 2014.

If virtue-signalling was limited to wearing a plastic wristband or buying an overpriced tray of figs because “values matter”, or joining a women’s march dressed like a vagina, then no harm done. Carry on and feel good, even if you’re not doing good.

But along the spectrum, there is also harmful virtue-signalling. The #BringBackOurGirls campaign in May 2014 didn’t bring back the girls kidnapped from the Chibok Government Secondary School by Boko Haram terrorists in Nigeria. Money, millions of dollars paid in secret deals two years later, returned those little girls to their families.

The popular story says a global social media storm, kicked off by then US first lady Michelle Obama and taken up by Hollywood celebrities holding signs saying BRING BACK OUR GIRLS, delivered freedom to more than 100 girls after 1102 days in captivity.

In fact, as a lengthy Wall Street Journal investigation found last year, “the full story, never before reported, says otherwise”. It found the social media campaign distorted outcomes, fuelled more hijackings and terrorist attacks and got in the way of negotiations with an evil band of terrorists.

The other danger is that so many people try to signal virtue these days by expressing hate and anger. Pick an issue, be it immigration, Trump, same-sex marriage, Pauline Hanson, capitalism, Trump, Brexit, climate change or Trump, we no longer just disagree with those with a different view. More and more, the imperative, especially among many on the left, is to hate the other side for holding views that suggest they are repositories of evil. When being angry at something makes you feel virtuous, anger becomes the drug of choice. The result is an age of outrage where listening to those we disagree with has become obsolete.

At the other end of the spectrum, the anger and unthinking parts of virtue-signalling have combined to form a stinky fertiliser generating something even more toxic. It’s no coincidence that, just as virtue-signalling has become fashionable, more and more young people are embracing communism, too.

Fiona Lali, president of the Marxist Society at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London, made headlines last week when she told BBC Radio 4’s Today program that communism failed in the Soviet Union because it didn’t have the “chance to develop”.

Lali is no outlier. The Marxist Student Federation in the UK claims more than 3000 students signed up across 32 universities last year. A ComRes survey found that 24 per cent of 1- to 24-year-olds see big business as more dangerous to the world than communism. The same survey found those who remembered the Soviet regime regard communism as a bigger threat than large corporations.

If Nazi groups were attracting thousands of new recruits on campuses, there would be bipartisan alarm, front-page stories and lengthy analyses reminding us of the evils of Nazi history, the more than six million Jews murdered in the Holocaust.

When students cosy up to communism, it’s written off as the salad days of youth, even though the horrors of communist regimes are more recent than Nazi Germany. You can only look favourably on communism if you suspend all senses, believe that sounding good is equal to doing good, and find excuses for the 20 million killed under Stalin, the 65 million deaths in China under communism, the millions more killed in Eastern Europe and Cambodia and Afghanistan and Latin America.

Alas, the young Marxist who makes excuses for communism is merely following others such as Eric Hobsbawn, the Hampstead Marxist and darling British historian to the left. During a 1994 interview, he was asked if communism had achieved its aims, at the cost of 15 to 20 million dead rather than 100 million, would that be OK. Hobsbawn said yes.

Hobsbawn’s tolerance of 15-20 million deaths brings to mind that famous conversation between George Orwell and a Stalinist who conceded some failures with communism but told the author of Animal Farm “you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs”.

Orwell’s reply sounded the toll on communism: “Where is the omelette?”

Given efforts to rejuvenate communism even as Venezuela fails, the man who brought us virtue-signalling wants to create a bricks-and-mortar Museum of Communist Terror in London. Bartholomew has done video interviews with men and women who suffered under communism, a woman born in a Russian gulag (her twin brother died there), another woman who survived the Kolyma camp in Siberia, a woman imprisoned by the Stasi in East Berlin, a Vietnamese man beaten at the age of nine for not informing on his father.

Bartholomew’s project, still in need of rich benefactors, is aimed at young millennials such as Lali. He tells Inquirer he’s concerned at “how little my children’s generation know about the communist terror and it leaves them intellectually defenceless against the apparent idealism of the extreme left”.

A few years ago when asked whether the 21st century needs a bit more idealism, British philosopher Roger Scruton said: “No, I think it needs a bit less idealism. The 20th century was created by idealism. Communism and fascism and Nazism are all based on idealised systems, what the world should be ideally, and how it isn’t what it should be, and therefore we’re entitled to change it radically and take control of it in order to do so. And the immediate result is genocides, as we see.”

Lali, the young Marxist, is right to feel aggrieved that “we’re the first generation that’s going to have living standards worse than our parents. I’m unlikely to ever own my own home and I’m going to graduate £40,000 in debt,” she told Radio 4. But embracing communism as a benevolent force is not a mere failure of imagination. It is a determined rejection of history, of facts, reason and clear thinking.

Virtue-signalling is a modern calamity when it muddies the mind, making it easier to ignore tens of millions killed under communist rule. Until this strain of the modern cultural virus is beaten, we are at risk right across the West of repeating the horrors of history, in the name of sounding good rather than doing good.

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